The curriculum sampler. What I have walked through so far this year 2013-2014

I feel like for some reason it is my job to try every curriculum out there and it is costing me a fortune. Well, comparatively we have yet to a cumulatively spend as much as one child's tuition at a private school. See perspective is everything. As homeschool parents, this is what we do, we try everything until we find a fit.  My local homeschool friends always ask me what are we using now. They love it, because I will get rid of it cheap. Nice for them.

So here we are 7 months in and I have an exhausting list of things we have tried. Her is the list and the pros and cons of each we used. Maybe you can glean some experience from this and not have to go to the trial and errors.

Easy Peasy Homeschool www.allinonehomeschool.com

This is a free program put together by an amazing woman. She has created an independent curriculum that just requires your child to work through each day's work. The site uses videos from you tube, free domain books on archive.org, along with other free resources she has found. She has amazing resources.

We used this for a month in the summer to see how it would fit.

Pros: My kids could work pretty much independently of me, especially for my child that can easily read. A lot of times,  my daughter would get up at 5am and would work for 4-5 hours to have most of her day free. The children enjoyed the time on the computer.

Cons: I had a difficult time keeping up with my kids to insure that the work was done and done correctly. I will admit that this could be the fact that I have 5 kids under 9 years old. I also could not insure that my little to no reading son did not just click through the work, I caught him. 

So this was just not a fit for us.

AOP lifepac

So with the start of September, I decided that we were going to finish those workbooks that I paid so much for. I made them suffer through three more weeks of it. Before I knew it was time to stop.

Pros: easy to follow teacher manual that went with the workbooks. As the children could read, they became more independent of me. The years worth of work is broken up into 10 small workbooks. This is nice because it doesn't get the children overwhelmed to see how much they have to do.

Cons: The workbooks are broken up into 3 sections and it is assumed you would take three weeks to complete. Well, there is not a start and finish to the day. They break the section into a list of activities, so spelling will show up five times, but in a random order. We had a hard time with knowing when enough was enough for the day. Sometimes the day would end in the middle of the page. This just made it difficult.

Also, my daughter found that the pages got busy and distracting with the images and she would often times get lost on what is the purpose to this exercise.

Sonlight - Core B & PK/K

So next I found sonlight and loved the reading, especially since my daughter consumes books like a bag of potato chips. I enjoyed the idea just a relaxed reading atmosphere. We easily submerged ourselves in this for about 5 weeks. 

Pros: everything is laid out for you. You get an amazing instructors guide and a forum that is not comparable to anything I have discovered. 

My favorite part that I will not part from is the science that they use in the beginning. It is a Usborne science activity do book that they paired up with a sonlight made DVD to walk you through each activity, that you can get a box with every tool you need for the experiments. I can't say enough about it.

I love the book selection also. Also, I was introduced to explore the code for my son that ended up being a great fit for him, but not for his sister.

Cons: you better have nothing else to do. The required reading of a few pages from several books a day times 2 became daunting for me. I would prefer a max of just 3 books at one time. Most times they would forget what we read from the day before. Some days I would read short excerpts from up to 16 books!

The instructors guide is through, but huge and overwhelming. Most times I would get lost in it, even after pulling out that weeks instruction into a smaller binder for my ease.

We had no success with the grammar, within 3 weeks I was asking a fellow homeschooled doing sonlight, what she used. 

Math-u-see

This program is a video instruction on DVD with the use of manipulative and a very simple workbook to reinforce. We used about 16 lessons of this.

Pros: they can work on this independently, are you seeing a trend on what fits with us. It uses pretty blocks and is simple enough.

Cons: I live in a world of distractions and most times they did not watch the instruction carefully. There was such a distance between the video and the practice my children were not retaining the building blocks to the lesson.

I know of another family that this works well with. We used it from the end of September to the first of December.

Explode the code

Great black and white drilling of phonetic principles with spelling. My son was able to work independent through the lessons with little oversight. Is a great fit for him. My daughter's attention was not held and she would lose sight of the intent on the page. We could not use this as a stand alone phonetic curriculum, we have completed 1 & 2, we have book 3. He wil finish book 3 and then we will not continue with explode the code, for now.

Christian light education, www.clp.org

This was brought to our attention from another home schooler. This is one of my favorites. We started it at the end of October and we still use it today in some areas. It is much like lifepac with the best qualities and some even better ones. We use the reading/learning to read and the language arts. We gave the math a try. But it was not a fit.

Pros: budget and user friendly with no fluff or frills that has helped my kids immediately learn. I can't say enough about it, my son's reading has drastically improved with this strong phonetic based program.  The 10 workbooks are laid out with a lesson a day, so it is clear and obvious where to start and end. The lessons maintain the same format so my children know what to expect and after a few lesson the instruction becomes strictly about the skill and not the technicalities on how you are to practice it. 

The phonetics are excellent and spelling training begins right away. Also another awesome way to reinforce reading.

Cons: in some ways it is a con, cle so effectively teaches the principles from the start, that as a consequence I had to have my third grader go back to the second grade reading and language so she would not miss the skills. So as a con, you almost have to work through every lesson to pick up the skills needed.

I love cle and plan for everyone of children to work through the kindergarten and first grade work.

Robinson curriculum

So I actually found this last year and tried to implement it and we were just not ready yet. Well as we approached December, I realized it was time to see if it was a fit again. Sure enough it is a good fit now. A bit of background, I actually heard Art Robinson on Moody radio a few years back, he and his wife homeschooled their 6 kids. She got sick and died within 24 hours. He decided to continue homeschooling them but did not have time to teach them. So he did an experiment that worked. He first liked the math they had, so he had them do 2 hours of math, if that ment 1 lesson or 2 or even half a lesson, this is what they did. They used Saxon 5/4 and up only. Next, he required his kids to write every day. When they were young, this was in the form of copy work, as they got older it was an essay. Next he put good books in front of them.  He packaged his curriculum up with the course of study that has stand alone value in its self. Then he has a collection of the enough books to give a 12 year education that you can convert to an e-reader pr print. He has a 2 hour video where he fully explains on his website. He is no nonsense or frills.

Pros: this is cheap with a mastery of the three Rs, arithmetic, reading and writing. Although the focus is just this and not social studies, science and everything else, it is enough. You have a wonderful experience in nature and experiments from the literature and an amazing basis of history. The vocabulary is amazing. You essentially do the parenting of teaching your child to learn and then be responsible for their own education.

Cons: although it is a k-12 program, you are required to teach reading before setting them off on their own. Reading is not included, but you are pointed to use a strong phonetic program. You better have a laser printer and a cheap toner source.  

I find my children do best when the books are on paper, I keep an electronic reader for when I am in a pinch and need new books now. So I print and bind a months books at a time and it takes me a day. So,entires I am just not in the the mood to do it. You must purchase math separately.

Ultimately, this is what my kids will use with minor supplementing. The rest of my children are in the pursuit to begin program. I tantalize my younger ones by reading them a page from a cool book. For instance, my son was in love with the letter from the author of Josephine Pollards book U.S. grant that states girls will not like this and she wrote it just for the interest of girls. Wow, did my son light up. I read with him the first page and then stopped, telling him he could read this himself as he masters phonetics. It keeps him motivated.

Saxon math 5/4 and higher

my daughter just hated math. It was a useless process as far as she was concern. Well, using art robinson recommendations I started saxon 54. I am using the third and second editions because they are cheap and easy to get on eBay. I purchased initially the textbook, answer keys, and test book. There is so much mastery in the textbook, I feel that the testing is unnesseccary and I will not require it from my kids.

Pros: it is easily purchased for around $40 for everything you need, it is not consumable, so it will be used by all 5 of my kids, making it an $8 investment per child. Since it is out of print, I will more than likely sell it  in 9 yrs for $40.

The lessons are laid out with a short warm up of about 4 problems to get the mind warmed up. My daughter usually needs to talk it out with me for the last problem, but gets it on her own with a bit of discussion. She then reads a 2 page lesson with example. Then works 5 problems on what she has learned. Then she works 25 problems from what she has already learned. 

The nice part about the 25 problem review is it gives her the practice to master it. And she is given a note to tell her what lesson the problem is from, so she can review the skill.

Cons: you need to have your math facts for at least addition and subtraction when starting and then simultaneously learn multiplication and division. My daughter resented matering the facts. It started catching up with her at lesson 10, by becoming very slow at her work. I made her take a week off to master her facts, it has helped tremendously. Since my son can not read by himself, he has mastered the facts better than her.

Also, your reading comprehension will become obvious. For me this is a blessing to find the weakness of other subjects, so you can correct it. For others I know, this has become an extreme stumbling block that has them disliking their saxon textbook. With discussion with my friend's kid, she quickly concluded it was not the math skills that made it difficult, but the reading.

So as I always say, hopefully we have found our fit and will not be changing anytime soon. I have also found some great supplements that keeps us on course with our Robinson Curriculum (RC), but I will save this for another discussion.

Hope this helps you,

Trish

When an all day time out is just necessary

When my sweet rooster just wants to start off in a daydream, dragging his feet at any idea to put paper to pencil, what is there to do?

I am going to bore it out of him. I love what Art Robinson said about letting a reluctant child sit in their seat for as long as it takes each day. It renews me, when my son just refuses. If it gets too bad, I send him to bed. I hope he goes to sleep, but mostly he forces himself to stay awake.

Reasoning? I tried telling him that his attitude is his only obstacle.

Punish it out of him.

Motivate him?

There will be a week here and there, that nothing is going right with him.  He just looses it.  Most of the time it is just exhaustion.  We might spend a few days of him going back and forth to bed and then we are done for a few weeks.  And then we start again.

It mostly goes he is stubbornly defiant and reluctant.  I send him to bed.

About 20 minutes goes by, he will ask to come out.  I let him out and he is told to do his work.  he will stare blankly at it.  I wait about 15 minutes and send him back.

about an hour will go by and he will ask again.  We will go through the same drama and he will be sent back.

Now this is when we begin the cycle of coming and going.  Usually after the third time, I make him stay until dad gets home.  sometimes I tell him 2 hours, I am always just in the hope that he will fall a sleep.

Once he gets about an hour of some afternoon ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzs.  He will usually come in sit down and do some work. Usually.

He is easy to pick out when he is tired.  The entire house will be screaming. He has those kind of magic powers.

This is what I can sometimes find him doing during his I will sit in bed days.

On days that it will be no use to sleep, I will typically bring his work to the room and I will work with him 20 minutes at a time through out the day.  Doing this, works out very well.

Alpha omega Lifepac - week 3

Week 3 is a better place to be at than week 1.

We finished week three with a smile. We are still tweaking our methods. Here are some of the things that are helping us streamline our day.

www.spellingcity.com

Have you heard of it? Ohh, I heard about it but I never spent anytime investigating it. Well, in a thought I realized I might as well pay for something that will prepare my kids for spelling, so I checked it out. it was free!!!!!!
So what I love
1. I put the spelling list in and I name them. So I have been naming them by book and section. List 205-1 is the fifth book for second grade section 1. The nice part is that lifepac gives a spelling list per section. This means as I am planning my schedule out, I know that after a self test it is time for a new list.
2. I can make my list and when Worm is done with it, I can unpublish it and save it until Rooster needs it. I like this, because I can keep just 2 list up to pick from or I could pick more.
3. The games are entertaining enough that my kids do not realize they are working the words over and over again to a point of mastery.
4. All time favorite. It will give them a spelling test. Haha, nothing like free me up from a responsibility. Hehe. I have worm take the test, typing the word on the computer and them writing it in her practice test page in the book. She has been able to ace each practice test, so I skip the actual test.

Now, I love the way lifepac systematically puts the spelling list together for 2nd grade, but 1st seems a bit random. Also, second grade has a page introducing the list and some practice, while in first grade, the spelling list is only in the teacher manual. I decided as we move through the book, we will change spelling list and use them on spellingcity, but I have no intention of testing first grade spelling, so I am not.




Mommy homeschool planner
I have always had a hard time with the homeschool planner.  Mostly, i felt that I was always filling it out and I was never using it.  So my work was going no where.  The hard part is figuring out what I should put in it. Mostly, because I had no idea what I needed.  I was so overwhelmed trying to figure out just what i should do, that I couldn't even get a grasp on what I needed.

• I need to keep dates on when I am starting and stopping our school year. 
• When we are actively working on workbooks.
• Our goals per child and as a family.
• keep grades
• track what we and they are going to cover and when.
• what I expect to cover each week and each day.
• track our reading 
• track our field trips

wow, I guess I now have a sense of what I need to track.  I am working out the kinks. Once I get it put together, I will share all my parts and where I found them to print.

Yearly schedule
So for the past 9 months we have had for a lack of order a very unscheduled schedule.  I would make some great list that we could never keep up with and constantly run with as it accumulated what we still needed to finish.  Now if that is not a recipe for burning out, I am not sure what is.

My initial thought for our new routine with our LifePac books was to do 6 weeks on and 1 week off, with about another 3 weeks off for holidays.  During those 6 week sessions I figured we would do 2 booklets each session with a total of  7 sessions.  Now of course i calculated my daughters entire 12 years of school and thought how awesome, 14 books a year, high school would be done in tenth grade.

Here we are at the end of our three weeks, and I think we could use a break.  We are a bit tired, we need to do some catch up.  As we intentionally did nothing today (week 4 of lifePac), I broke from our routine and let the kids run off the glazed donuts lunch. Don't judge, I ate most of them to limit their sugar intake.

So my head was whirling in guilt for taking the day off and realizing we were really going to take the whole week off. So my head got to calculating.  Each year, we could go 12 - 3 week sessions.

• This is the state required 36 weeks/180 days, compared to the 42 week/210 days I was originally planning.  
• We will still be working year round, because that at the moment feels right.  
• We could possibly accomplish 2 books into the next grade each year.
• At the end of each 3 week session, we should have a book done.  If not, this gives us a week to work on it.
• Gives us a week of down time, to focus on hands on learning and fun. (hmm, this week, not sure.)

image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brown_Leghorn_rooster_in_Australia.jpg

On a side note, I am so happy to announce!
Rooster's booklets are not as spoon-fed as they go on.  happy Dance.  making it through the booklets, I was not prepared that the booklets will fill the need for his daily reading.  His reading is improving with this camouflaged reading.

Cool tools
I hit the office supply store for a few things and grabbed 3 of these.  I am not sure how well they will work out, but I have a feeling they will be useful.

It fits all 5 Lifepac booklets plus the handwriting workbook.  So now lets see if it gets used.

Alpha omega lifepac - week 2

Hmm, all the reviews say it takes 45 minutes for the whole days worth of work. Then why is it 5 pm and we only have 1 book done for the 5 to do. I am only assigning 3 pages each day. It is the rooster. Getting him to calm down for the day is just an all day affair. With that said, I look forward to the days that we can sail through. Our core and get right onto enrichment.

Now That the week is over, I feel exhausted. At week 2, the biggest eye opener is: I am thankful to have a well laid out curriculum, because our self discipline, more like my kids is showing its self. My goal is to push through this and still stay moderately on schedule. I feel like this is just learning a new routine, plus I changed the house around, giving them a permanent workplace. So I am sure their little minds are still whirling.

As always it is the Rooster that is the anchor in our day. He gets me so focused on him, that my worm goes off on a bunny trail in her head and she too, is no longer getting anything accomplished. I am questioning anyone with energized 7yr olds, is your kid like this? Wy, yes, yes they are. I am trying to keep in mind that this is just a season, he will grow into an amazing young man.


We gave our homeschooling a "on the go" test, since it is so bragged about that it is transportable for errands. So with a doctors appointment for the baby on Wednesday and a dentist appointment for everyone with teeth on Thursday, we gave it a try. The second grade work, was easy enough to do. The first grader needed me at his side to do his work. So we are not at home, maintaining a watchful eye on my other children, while waiting for our appointment. Hmm, first grade work did not work out so good. By Thursday, I decided not to focus on it. So we hit the library.

Spoon feeding the Rooster is getting the best of me. Being the mom I am, and wanting to do everything from cover to cover, I must let go a bit. There is a large chunk of this book that is really a review or tying up loose ends for Rooster. As always, here I am trying to do every itty bitty activity with him, dragging our day on and on. I decided to keep the conversation to the page work and skip the activities. If he does poorly on a self test, then we can come back for the activities. This should shorten our day and keep us from burning out with each other.

I love the awesome journals, are they performing accurately, whelp, not at this age. I still like them for recording grades, but I need something in addition to them to keep up with and my eyes open to what the kids will be working on and if they are staying caught up. So I am looking for better mommy planning.

I hate that I feel that we are on a delicate schedule with very little wiggle room. I am still contemplating how we will handle our end of the portfolio. I was reminded that I can relax, but the mommy in me is still concerned. It is possible that I might only submit in our portfolio the work we complete in the lifepac series. Thankfully, we are working this school year to the end of August.

Alpha Omega Lifepac - Week 1

With feeling so behind in our year a done need to make up some time, we started lifePAC the day After receiving them. Now doing this with a mom on the verge is not to smart. so we started on a Friday, skipped monday and finished out the week. We had some ups and downs.


Now for my planning on the fly, I have had a few shake ups. My initial plan was to work through 3 pages a day. Nice plan.

We did day 1 and I got a taste of lifepac. Mostly we introduced the format and the expectations of life pac. I had a small shock of needing to reel the worm back in, since she took off with it and went astray in the book. I almost felt like I was being left behind and had no idea where the two were going, wait I started without planning. Of course, what should I have expected to have happened!

Our two hour ride Monday, gave me a chance to review the lifepac 1st grade. Going through it with paper and pen, I was able to make a list of what I needed on hand for the day. I also created a noted book for 9 weeks, for me to keep track of the things I need each day and our expectations for the week. I am also using the record keeper from lifePac to record as we go. This was a huge benefit for my worm.

I have to laugh, the review, yes I bought, but I am still reading them. Alright, the reviews state there is no planning. Well by mid-week, I am thinking yah right. It does need a little prep work, because flying by the seat is hard, especially with five kids. I guess this is why lifepac says to work one workbook a head. Hmm, eventually.

The Worm is finding her groove.

So to do a bit of catch up, I am not allowing us to fall behind. So I make us plans and expectations of what we need to get done in our booklets. If we are not at our end of the week page by Friday night, than the kids have to forfeit Saturday. This also means not just the lessons, but also correcting the work.

At the end of our first week, we will be schooling on Saturday. Rooster will be making up about 2 days, while Wormy will fix a few problems and write a story she missed to do.

We actually had a great week. At the first part of the week, I thought the curriculum was going to be a bust. Nice about the way lifepac is working out, is that I the core work text drive us along and then it is easy enough to add to it. This week both worm and rooster did a book report, sadly their first ever for me. They did handwriting everyday. Worm started everyday with a devotion. Score!

Rooster working on Lego Calendar

Now things to know. Our 45min per subject, making a 4.5 hour day, was in some cases a 6 hour ordeal. I think this is a short term thing. My son, rooster, takes a long time to get started, like 2 hours to get going. He literally spends 2 hours on the first subject and then only half an hour on each after that. Doesn't matter what the subject is.

Also we did a total of 4 quizzes, ha, we had not done that yet.

A bit about rooster. He is a brand new 7.
Thursday resulted in a test of car schooling. Mixed reviews.

Things I was not expecting:
1. I would have to sit with Rooster the entire time he schools. There are minimals written instructions for him as they expect him to be a limited reader. Well, he is a limited reader, but there is enough reading with all 5 booklets to give him a good bit of practice. I noticed by the end of Saturday he was doing much better at reading.

2. Lots of vocabulary words in every subject. At this point with Rooster, we write the 3-5 words on paper talk about them. We figure out how many syllables are in the word, we identify any double letter phonograms, identify any spelling rules, and then count how many sounds are in the word. All of these task are the rules we found in logic of English book I downloaded this winter. The task of doing this is greatly helping my son to identify the rules and encouraging him sound words out.

3. feeling like we are getting somewhere. Boo yah! Love the fact that we did a lot and have a lot to show for it. And for once, it is like we did a lot of learning and not chasing our tails.

Monkey doing a puzzle that gave me about 10 minutes.  spent 45 minutes finding all the pieces.

4. I better find a way to keep the monkey busy.

Lets see what this week brings.
T

Our journey into alpha omega lifepac curriculum

So I ended Easter Sunday with a bang of a meltdown. Not meaning to, the Hulk came out and began a screaming nightmare on the entire family. See it all of sudden hit me that none of our curriculums have been working and what really brought this to an inferno boiling point is the fact that my deranged "rest of the world does it better" thinking is, that we must be done with this years education at the end of May. Mix this with the fact that somewhere in December final nesting kicked in with the pregnancy and I magically threw out two months of schooling. Then the fact that I never submitted an homeschool portfolio for the year and my former engineer brain is envisioning the binders of engineers reports that would be submitted for a permit. All this equalled an unfair tyrant explosion onto my entire family.

I allowed fear to make me a hulk and expected everyone to take responsibility in it, yikes, how selfish of me. The real source of my problem is that the curriculum we intended to use at the beginning just did not work. Then the worst was that it really stopped working for us in mid October (we start in September for the "new" year), but we floundered with it until the first of the year. At the first of the year I found the Robinson curriculum and fell in love with the entire concept. The kids could teach themselves, once they learned to read. Well, love the Robinson (RC) curriculum, especially for the price, but it is not something that I can employment yet. For the price of $100, I did obtain the hundreds of electronic books for my home library.

As for RC, I consider it an awesome tool. The biggest thing I learned from it, is my teaching style and ability. With the things that need to be done with the five kids ranging from 8 years old to 3 months, I do not have the luxury of time and energy to teach every one everything, one spoon at a time.

So as the public school masses are finishing up their school year, we are not yet half way done. Well, after my bossy fit to my children I started an all out assault on a better curriculum. I have tried several things and found some great tools, but they did not fit our needs. Our list:

> rod and staff curriculum - math, reading, and English 1 st and 2 nd. Now this is what we originally started with. The math was good but became overwhelming to my second grader. I liked the simplicity of, but I think it drowned my children with the mastery work of the math. Reading was good , but here again, when you have slow workers the task becomes gigantic and they shut down on me

> plaid phonics by modern curriculum press- 1st and 2nd. I liked it and of all our things this lasted the longest. I only had the workbooks and did not have teacher manuals. In the end it began to feel like busy work.

> spelling workout. I liked it a lot, but it was too easy again to go through the motions without the reverent ion of proper spelling rules.

> writing with ease level 1 & 2- hm try to deliver this 2 separate times was doomed to fail with my routine. I also had the grammar one at 2 levels, yep we couldn't always fit it in and it too fell away.

> story of the world - love it, we might actually pick this one back up when we get things in a better balance. My children learned a lot. Not sure if I will do any of the worksheets, since I use them as a crutch and stop engaging the learning experience. My children from the first chapter were so encompassed in the story and their need for food that the family would eat lizards, well, my children and their rock stomachs had to give it a try, yuk! Well if a book could get my children to eat lizards raw, it says something about the books, they were wanting to live it out.

> mammoth math- must say I do like it. I used it just for a month. If I didn't go for the entire grade set on lifepac, I would have stayed with it. The Worm (2 nd grade) actually began to see math in the mental form to perform addition and subtraction with ease. The worm's change in attitude is amazing.

>life of Fred - love the book, but I have a hard time using it as a core lesson. I would consider it enjoyable math reading that you would use the pencil and paper. We grasped bigger concepts thanks to it and it also helped me to better talk math to my children. We might still use it as an enjoyable enrichment activity.

> logic of English - cant say enough about it. Loved it, still using it somewhat as a reference. I would enjoy going through the lessons myself, to fill in any errors. With the easy to learn spelling rules, we finally got my husband to stop saying cayenne pepper with a soft c. Yeah for my ears. I took out her reference sheet for phonograms and spelling rules and we use it with our lifePAC spelling list.

>logic of English cursive -completely awesome. Best way to teach cursive, it even had my 5 year old attempting handwriting, my 7 yr old began gaining confidence. We use this as our foundation for learning the appropriate formation of letters.

> science was an awesome Evan Moore plant thing with way to many printable sheets. Nice but again, I worksheet my kids to death that it failed.

That is a ton of materials to go through in a single year for just 2nd and 1st grade, and yet I had no idea where they were and keeping them progressing, honestly, I felt like we spent the last 3 months in a holding pattern. Well, a few things came to light in my homeschool heart.

1. My kids have a preference to learning in a specific style, but if it is not conducive to moms other million responsibilities or moms natural thinking and amount of sleep available, it is going to fail.

2. I am a cover to cover kind of mom. I know sounds way to lame, but I don,t have the mental energy to think on my own, I need to follow a path provided that my children and I can walk hand and hand together. Not me pulling them like a stubborn donkey, and in some case a curriculum that would allow them to drag me through it.

3. I need a chapter at a time glance, not the entire year. I like programs that spilt the books up to little books versus my kids and I looking at a huge text thinking will I ever get done with this.

4. Feeling like we are by the seat of our mental pants and space limited and energy deprived, I need something thAt doesn't require me to chase down a ton of books, and to have huge teacher manuals, supplements. I just do not have the space.

5. I wanted something we could jump into mid year. And would give me the ability to grade and give assessments.

With these factors and a few others I began doing my research. I read probably several hundred reviews, and I began pointing towards lifepac, even though they have a lot of mixed reviews about their effectiveness and also being a subject behind and taking no time to complete. With all those factors I came to my own conclusion, that I think the lifepac starts of slow and easy until 3rd grade. Makes since building up confidence and keep points before asking them to work very independent. In reviewing the reviews I gathered that there are a ton of projects and if you just focus on the work text and do not review and include the teacher manual, then yes you could fly through it and miss the depth,

There is not clear perfect curriculum, but I needed to find something that would keep me from leaving my children behind academically and would not ouch of the edge to Hulkhood. The part I liked was that you can assess the kids and fit them in to not just a grade but a book to. So I reviewed their skills and realized worm, should start of in book 5 of second grade, which is really right were we are in instruction. Sadly I seen were I have fail the Rooster, I needed to place him in just book 2. I think I could have pushed him above, but we are in need of confidence building and self discipline for sitting and working on Our work. I did not want to take on that task while teaching completely new concepts.

I bought the entire core curriculum for second and first. This is the first time I bought an entire grade of a complete curriculum for my kids since I flunked out of Abeka k4 program with Worm. I did get excited about all the pretty boxes, for some reason they make me happy.

I plan to come back and report my findings as I start this travel. Mostly because I have not found a lot about any families that are actually using then.